"We're on the same radius from the Earth, and then we start to swing around to where we're ahead of them on the velocity vector, so we come in relative to the station from this forward velocity position and dock on to the forward end of the Lab"

"We still have a lot of international partner modules that need to get up there to make it truly the international structure that it will be, and that's highly important; we need to get to where the crew size is bigger"

"It is a very busy mission: every day has some major goals that we have to get through, but my experience before has been that at least in the evening, you kind of take a deep breath and look around where you are and have some downtime"

"It definitely helps to have been through the arm training flow before and to have used the arm on orbit, and it also gives me the confidence to know that our training facilities are really good, that when you get up there, you feel like you've been there"

"In the Astronaut Office we're never totally out of training, we always keep our hand in it. But after five years, things have changed and so it's been good to get back into the flow and relearn a lot of things"

"I grew up watching a lot of the coverage of the early U.S. space program, all the way back starting with Mercury and then through Gemini and Apollo and of course going to the moon as the main part of the Apollo program"

"As always, we prepare for all sorts of contingencies. And the first few days of the flight up until docking on Day 3 are all spent really in the rendezvous because we launch at a time that puts us in an optimal position to catch up to station"

"We're taking up some science experiments, some crystal growth things, we have a refrigerator that carries up some samples, new samples that go into the station, we bring the old ones home; we have a lot of clothing, we have a lot of food-U.S. and Russian food"

"It is spectacular. From about five minutes in, when we knew for sure that we were going to have the weather to go, the smile on my face just got bigger and bigger, and I was just beaming through the whole launch. I mean, it is just an amazing ride"

"Canada's a huge country, so to be able to unite the country through communication satellite technology or to be able to observe it through remote sensing technology from space is a natural fit for a country like Canada"